I don't consider sideloading rooting either. I have no plans to root mine. I am very happy with the way it is. I love the battery life in the Fire. It's pretty amazing. I don't want to mess the dynamics Amazon has done to get it that way. I'm very careful with the apps that go on here.

I'm not really going to root. I'll be very careful to only try things from reliable users like here on this site

Nah I rooted, because here soon I expect to put market and gapps on there and hopefully soon there will be adhoc support.

Adhoc support would be great! My phone only supports adhoc tethering, and the Kindle does not, so right now I'm out of luck with tethering. I saw a thread or two about it on XDA, but there doesn't appear to be a working solution yet.

Basically what iOS ecosystem achieves is that while there is a small group of jailbroken users, but the majority of people run plain, walled-garden iOS.
With Android, the ratio is the opposite - most users I have met love to tinker with their devices and I have not found two Android devices 100% alike.
I wonder what the ratio will be with Kindle Fire, vote away!

I'll sideload, but not root. I put a Android apps on there that aren't supposed to work. Some do some don't. If they don't, I delete them. That's as far as I'll go. Rooting scares me a little. I don't know why, I do very well with techy things. No jail breaking for my iPhone either. I do love to tinker but I'd hate to brick it.

I rooted only for a few minor reasons: to get the android market and google calendar. Both require you put a file in a directory that's normally read-only and then you can unroot, which I did. I have only re-rooted after updates long enough to fix those two functions (actually android market never stopped working for me but the google calendar did). Both are really a matter of convenience.

Beyond that I don't plan on doing much tweaking, for a while at least. I'm at the point with it now that it does everything I want. But not everything has been discovered by the hackers yet.

Coming in way late here and reversing my previous answer, I would really like to root it. If it hadn't been a gift from someone who had no business giving me a gift that expensive, it would be rooted. But if i mess it up, I would feel lower than slime.

My Kindle fire is not even recognizable as the Amazon product without rooting at this point.

I am running Go launcher & Rotating wall paper.

All of my mainly used Apps are side loaded
including any Video I may want to watch using "Mobo player"
I am using Aldiko For My Novels & PDF files

I am using Comic reader mobi for my Comic book reading in CBR& CBZ format making the Comixolgy app useless to me.
I am an artist to the Autodesk Sketchbook mobile I got from Amazon for $1 was a great deal .